From Compliance Problems to a Norm Contestation Crisis?

Recently, several governments openly opposed EU law and court decisions. In 2017 PMs Orbán and Szydlo signaled that they would not accept the ECJ’s ruling on the refugee relocation scheme by announcing that they would continue to resist European relocation plans. A year later the Polish government rejected the EU’s criticism regarding the law on the Supreme Court and continued with its contested reforms while the Hungarian government claimed that it would not even consider to change the heavily criticized “Stop-Soros-package” if the case was referred to the ECJ (Hungarian Government 2017; Völner 2017). The same year, the Italian government rejected the Commission’s demands regarding the Italian budget and the Italian Interior Minister publicly stated that he would not care about Brussels criticism. In all of these cases, political actors publicly expressed their unwillingness to adhere to European rules. These acts of open defiance of EU rules suggest that we are about to face another crisis, namely a crisis of member state governments’ commitment towards the idea of supranational decision-making. This would go far beyond what has been observed in the 2000ies and later as ‘compliance problems’ (mainly transposition delay or lack of implementation). Especially the resistance against ECJ rulings suggests that governments no longer accept the principle of precedence of EU law over national law, calling EU law as such and thus the EU’s foundations into question. As the EU lacks sufficient capacity to enforce member states’ compliance (Soros 2019) scholars and practitioners already warn that this new kind of non-compliance might bear a “systemic risk of disintegration” (Börzel und Risse 2018). To advance our understanding of these processes, the proposed paper analyzes the patterns of non-compliance in East Central European Countries, namely Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Firstly, we examine whether the rhetoric opposition to EU law described above is actually accompanied by a general trend towards non-compliance with commonly agreed EU rules in the region. Do the states under investigation actually infringe on EU law more often than before? Secondly, we analyze if certain states defy EU law more often than others and if non-compliance is restricted to certain policy areas. Thirdly, we test, if detected patterns of compliance and non-compliance can be explained by factors such as the party composition of the government or the salience of certain EU policies. Our analysis is part of the work program of the Jean Monnet Chair ‘Political System of Germany and Politics in Europe’ and it mainly draws on Commission data on infringement procedures. The case selection allows us to investigate (non)compliance-patterns in countries with similar context factors.